


Do Everything You Can To Survive

by LaShaRa



Series: Amegakure Orphans [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Amegakure, Angst, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Konan Is Badass, Konan deserved better, Multi, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-05 23:33:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21216875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaShaRa/pseuds/LaShaRa
Summary: Konan knows she’s living on borrowed time. That doesn’t stop her from doing the best she can by her people, or keeping the promises she made long ago.





	1. If You Hesitate I'll Leave You Behind

**Author's Note:**

> For Y, who made the right call when they introduced me to Konan. You were right.

It’s dusk in Ame. Konan knows this because she loves the village, and she knows everything there is to know about the places she loves. She knows the way the clouds start deepening in hue, slowly and then all at once, from steel to mauve to aubergine in the span of seven minutes. She knows the sound of the rain picking up its pace, moving from a steady drumming in the background to a sudden rushing roar, sending people on the street sprinting for cover. She knows that sometimes, just for a second, the clouds might part in the west, letting through the briefest gleam of golden sky, an enchanted glimpse capable of bringing the whole village to a standstill. 

They’re not that lucky today; the clouds are packed close together, glowering, almost daring any kind of light to make it through. Thunder growls. As if in response, Amegakure lights up. From her perch on the hospital roof, Konan sees a familiar flash as the shinobi in the western watchtower fire the beacon. Within thirty seconds, lights are flaring out in all directions. By the next thunderclap, the Amegakure skyline is a tangle of bright windows and billboards, streetlamps and lanterns, stealing focus from the clouds and giving it back to all the life below. 

Konan stands and makes her way to the edge of the roof. She’s been visiting patients all afternoon, which is a regular enough occurrence for the village head, but there’s one encounter that sticks in her mind today. A jounin trio, back from successfully repelling a band of Mist nin trying to infiltrate the eastern border. The two men - Rai and Akiara, she reminds herself - had taken the brunt of the attack, keeping the Mist nin at bay until their third teammate, Kaida, arrived to take them all down with extreme prejudice and one of Ame’s rare and violent clan jutsu. A fitting speciality for the petite, terrifyingly thin kunoichi with dark, spiky hair hanging around her face, who hadn’t said a word during Konan’s entire visit. She’d on the window ledge and sharpened her kunai while glowering at her teammates, ignoring Konan’s commendations. Rai had glared right back with the eye that wasn’t swathed in bandages; Akiara chatted blithely to Konan, oblivious to the thunderclouds building in the other half of the room. 

None of them are more than twenty years old. They are her shinobi and without them Amegakure would be so much harder to defend, but Konan is envious of them. They are young and bright and well-aware that they deserve better than life in the endless rain, but they stay. They fight for Ame, and they fight for each other. She thinks about the way Rai’s eyes follow Kaida’s every move, the way Kaida snaps a retort to every word out of Rai’s mouth, the way they both watch Akiara out of the corner of their eyes, ready to jump to his defense at a moment’s notice. Amegakure is a village of orphans, a hideaway for the bereaved, and yet here were three of her jounin, like so many of her shinobi, ready at a moment’s notice to fight to the death for each other, unable to imagine that it could ever be any more complicated than that. 

Konan steps up to the edge of the roof. It’s easy to look at shinobi like Rai and Kaida and Akiara and feel like there are lifetimes between her and them, and maybe that’s truer than she lets herself believe, most of the time. But she’s turning thirty-five in two days, and Nagato is not here. 

Yahiko is not here. 

Konan jumps. 

There’s a second where Amegakure roars towards her, streetlamps and street signs blurring together as she spins through the air and then her wings snap out on either side of her, the jutsu instinctive after all this time. She pulls up out of her dive and into a climb without pause; the rain strikes her in the face and her hair streams out behind her head, longer than it’s been in years, trailing her like a neon banner. Not that she needs one; as she banks between the armory and the administration building faces are already rushing to the windows, moving onto balconies, eyes turned upwards. In the hazy, smoggy air of the village her wings are lighting-bright, unmistakable and anyway, what other village head takes flying tours of their domain every night? 

Konan knows it’s ridiculous. She’s a shinobi; they’re at war. Exposing her signature jutsu to hundreds of people on a daily basis is on par with the way Konoha’s jinchuriki parades its streets shouting his intention to be Hokage while the Yondaime’s likeness looks down from the mountain with those same wide eyes. 

But Konan can’t stop. Flying though Amagekure’s nightscape is like falling into a dream. The rain reflects its lights back to her tenfold. She inhales smoke, oil, gas, all the dregs and particles of her village. She ducks under electric wires, jackknifes between buildings, skims the puddles on main thoroughfares and everywhere people look up to watch her go.  _ Tenshi-sama!  _ shriek the small band of war orphans perpetually orbiting the dango stand, momentarily abandoning its weary proprietor to chase after her reflection instead.  _ Tenshi-sama!  _

It’s the name she’s heard on an almost daily basis, since coming back.  _ Tenshi,  _ angel, messenger of God. 

But Nagato’s gone, and the only messages Konan’s delivering are her own. And Uzumaki Naruto’s. In the meantime, she runs the village and she guides her shinobi and she flies the evening patrol. Because Ame needs to see her. They need to see that she’s there for them, that she’s going to stay. 

Until she doesn’t. Until it’s time. But that’s not the sort of qualifier that raises morale, so she keeps it to herself. 


	2. Hold On, Stay Still

By the time she’s flown her circuit and doubled back to the western watchtower, she’s soaked to the bone, hair plastered to her sodden robes, wings vibrating with the effort of keeping the water at bay. She’s timed it perfectly; Hoshiko has just started her shift at the beacon. She stands respectfully as Konan comes in for her landing, but she also snaps out her hand at the same time. Konan feels the warmth of the jutsu as it hits her and then every inch of her is suddenly as dry as Sand Country. She stumbles out of the air, overcome by the dissonance between pelting rain and warm skin, and lands heavily on the stone balcony. Hoshiko snorts in amusement; the genin on shift with her leaps to her feet in alarm. 

“Hoshiko-san” greets Karin, righting herself. “Was that really necessary?”

“With all due respect, senpai, I was acting in your best interests,” drawls Hoshiko, her green eyes dancing. “We can’t have our guardian angel catching cold. Really, you should take better care of yourself.

“And I suppose you’d know all about that, Hoshiko-san,” Konan returns amicably. She smiles at the genin. “Mieko-chan. I dare say you’ve discovered this already, but you’ll have to stay alert while on shift with Hoshiko-san.”

“Yes, Konan-sama,” agrees Mieko, her eyes wide. Hosiko snorts again, but it’s gentle. “Mieko-chan, why don’t you fetch our fearless leader some tea, she looks like she could use it.

Mieko’s disappeared through the tower’s trapdoor before Konan can blink. “Your student seems intimidated,” she observes mildly as they settle themselves at the base of the beacon. The sudden roaring warmth makes her dizzy, but she maintains her casual tone. “Was that your doing or mine?”

Hoshiko grins. “As much as it pains me to admit it, that was probably your fault. She’s star-struck around you. All the genin are; so are the jounin, as it happens.” She pauses and inspects her razor-sharp fingernails. “I can’t imagine why.”

Konan laughs. “Careful, minx, I can still have you transferred to the power plant.” It’s mostly an empty threat: Hoshiko could find ways to amuse herself at the bottom of a sewer, let alone the power plant (and has done so frequently, if Konan recalls her genin training correctly). But more than that, Hoshiko’s one of the few Ame shinobi who don’t let rank and awe and Konan’s former affiliations get in the way of casual banter and Konan is grateful for it, especially on nights like this. 

“I head about Red Team,” Hoshiko says after a few moments of watching the beacon leap and crackle in silence. “You might consider Kaida for promotion to strategist, if she keeps this up - that was a crazy plan but it worked."

“Reckless, too,” murmurs Konan. It’s nothing she hasn’t said to Red Team before. Their plans are outrageous and usually involve someone taking one for the team, and it’ll work right up until it doesn’t. “We’ve lost enough people.”

Hoshiko’s eyes slant across to her. “Those are strange words from a village head, Konan-sama.”

The honorific is a reminder and a reprimand both. Konan knows that Amegakure will hold out only as long as its people have faith that holding out, staying here, keeping the village running, will one day be worth it, better than fleeing into the wilderness the way she and her boys had once done. A great part of that faith lies in knowing that Ame’s shinobi are still willing to give everything they have to protect it, and very often all they have are their lives. Konan can’t be heard questioning that will to serve, whatever her reasons. 

Before she can reply, Mieko scrambles back through the trapdoor, bearing a tea tray. Surprisingly, two more genin pop their heads through after her; two identically fiery shocks of hair, two sets of brilliant blue eyes, two impish grins.  _ God,  _ but they’re young. “Konan-sama! Konan-sama!” they holler gleefully, with an exuberance that can only be Hoshiko’s influence.. “Mieko-chan said we shouldn’t come see you! But we came anyway because we wanted to see you!” 

Hoshiko sighs audibly as she busies herself with the tea; Mieko is actually scowling. She looks startlingly like Kaida. Konan finds herself grinning at the scamps. Naoyuki and Naozumi, she thinks, recalling one of Hoshiko’s recent tirades about the other two members of her genin team. “All right, brats, you’ve seen me. What is it you want?”

“Naoyuki learned a jutsu!” shouts Naozumi, shoving his brother bodily into the tower room. “Show her, show her, show her!”

Konan accepts the shallow cup of tea and watches as Naoyuki takes a breath, narrows his eyes to a squint and begins forming seals. They’re rushed and clumsy, and it takes her a second to realize what he’s trying to do before there’s a soft  _ crack! _ and a small paper kunai is flying through the air towards Meiko. She has a kunai of her own drawn faster than Konan can blink and uses it to bat Naoyuki’s creation straight into the beacon, where it ignites.

Naozumi cheers; Naoyuki crows in triumph. Konan drinks her tea and raises her eyebrows at Hoshiko, whose face wears a fantastically conflicted expression of pride and exasperation. Genin shouldn’t even be able to attempt the jutsu, but somehow one holy terror of the Amagekure mission room has managed to accomplish it, and there’s no doubt his brother is close behind. Children, collecting new ways to kill faster than they collect times tables. Uzumaki Naruto’s face flashes into her mind and she winces minutely. Meiko, having come closer to retrieve her kunai, catches the expression and frowns; Konan chides herself _ \- not here -  _ and lets a smile unfurl across her face. “Well done, Naoyuki-kun! That was somewhat unpolished, but an enthusiastic start nonetheless.”

The cheering redoubles and Hoshiko growls, “Please don’t encourage them, senpai,” but she’s smiling even as she shows Naozumi a faster way to form the seals. Konan takes that as her cue to leave, cuffing the twins around their ears and thanking Meiko for the tea. She could take the trapdoor and descend through the tower, but the thought of all the other names and faces waiting for her below is abruptly exhausting. She’s at the balcony before the genin notice where she’s headed, but when she leaps into the air, wings flaring into being around her, their yells of delight follow her into the rain. 

She hadn’t expected to get along with Ame’s genin, hadn’t imagined being such a vital figure in their lives. It’s not like she had much time to learn how, in the Akatsuki. They’d never talked about it, she and Yahiko. It had always been something for when peace was achieved. When the wars were over. She’d barely had Yahiko to herself before he was taken from them and taken the pieces of her that wanted that kind of future along with him. The thought had never really came back, with Nagato. 

She knows better than to think about this. She knows better than to think about it in the open, in the air, when they’re at war, with half her shinobi away from the village and the other half healing from injuries. She knows better, but she’s tired tonight. 

She’s turning thirty-five in two days and they’re not here and it shouldn’t matter, after all she’s seen and done and will still have to do. It shouldn’t matter. But it does. 


	3. Let's Meet Back Here One Day

She’s soaked to the skin again by the time she reaches the shrine. It’s a long flight from the village proper, high in the ravines on the border. The structure itself had been abandoned for over a century before Konan found it and no one has gotten within a day’s journey on foot since then. It takes her five minutes to undo the wards and another five minutes to seal them again behind. Once she’s sure the boundaries are secure, she lights a lamp and touches the flame to the shallow groove that runs along the walls. 

Light flares immediately, a sparking wave that curves all the way around the circular walls to end beside the entrance through which she’d entered. Konan walks forwards, her robes dripping onto the marble floors as they dry. She comes to a halt between two pillars on the far side. Beneath her boots, the blue stones of the carved Rinnegan glow and hum to life. “Hello, boys,” Konan says, and her voice is too loud in a silence broken only by the snapping of flames, the rain beating steadily outside, the faint hum of too many wards to count.

It had taken her some time to build the shrine. There had been so much to do after she’d returned to Ame. There was rebuilding to supervise, shinobi to recruit, organize and train, attacks to repel, alliances to build. She could have asked for help. There are civilians and shinobi alike in Ame who remember Yahiko and Nagato, who supported their dream for peace, and mourned their passing. Red Team had trained with Nagato during one of his visits, back when they were still chuunin; Hoshiko had met Yahiko as a genin. They would have helped honor them. 

But the battered remains she carried back from Konoha are all she has left of her boys, and she knows what they’re worth, even battered, in the right hands. So she’d built the shrine by herself, stealing away from Ame night after night for a month, scavenging what she could from the surrounding structure - a forgotten temple to forgotten gods - and mixing it with stone from the ravines, Ame stone, and every ward and seal she could think of. 

The flowers had taken the longest. They’d come to her so easily once, back when they were just harmless, pretty things she’d made as comforts and reassurances and gifts, but these had to be perfect. They could never fade, never wrinkle, never mold. She’d stayed in the ravine for two days, crafting blossom after blossom, until the stone caskets in which she’d laid what remained of them were mostly engulfed in a drift of pure, untainted white, a colour she’d only seen once, on an S-ranked mission in the Yukigakure mountains. Yahiko had laughed like the lunatic child he still was on rare, precious occasions and hurled snowballs in all directions. Nagato had evaded every single one, crinkles of amusement appearing at the corners of his eyes, and Konan had lain on her back in the snow and laughed and made herself a different kind of angel until it was time to go and take out their target.  _ _

Here and now she sinks to the floor, folding herself into the centre of the Rinnegan carving. The rain outside recedes; the flames cast shadows on the angel wings she’d etched into the stone panel above the caskets, all those months ago. She waits for the moment when her memories spill out into the silence, into the only place where it’s safe enough to revive them. Between one heartbeat and the next there is a brilliant tangerine flash, Yahiko’s hair shining like a beacon in the rain, a blessing and a curse, the same bright shade until the moment he died. The quiet, droll huff of Nagato’s amusement, never quite a laugh, but recognizable as such all the same. The sound of their combined chatter around the table with Jiraiya, one of the first times they’d ever felt full, ever been able to say  _ Itadakimasu!  _ with anything other than desperate irony. 

_ Sensei, I’m starting to get the hang of fishing! _

_ Really? Seems like you’re getting more and more reliable! _

The two of them whispering behind a pillar like the teenagers they were, the day she’d turned down Kyusuke. The clash of her weapons and Yahiko’s three seconds after she’d asked him to spar, the brilliance of his grin above the shining metal. Nagato, standing at the foot of the stairs, watching them beat each other to a pulp, the faintest of smiles on his pale face. 

_ Konan...what did you tell him? _

_ I told him that I don’t have time for a relationship, until we make the Akatsuki’s dream come true. Isn’t that right? _

She’d lied, and they knew it, because by then she’d been in love with him for years. They all were in a way, all of their Akatsuki brothers, but she and Nagato had loved him the longest. How could they not? From the moment she’d met him she’d been keyed to the exuberance in him, the strength, the determination, the calm. His voice had spurred her on at her lowest, centered her in the midst of battle, brought her back to herself on those rare, unreal nights when everyone else was out on missions, even Nagato, and it was only them in the safehouse. Even now, she can close her eyes and remember every detail about him - how his eyelashes had a swooping elegance to them, like a well-angled brush stroke, the way his eyes were always bright, how wide they became when she managed to surprise him. If he hadn’t died, if they’d made the dream come true, if Ame had finally been safe, Konan knows she’d have packed up her life and followed Yahiko anywhere he wanted to go. 

And in the end she’d followed Nagato instead, even if he was the shell of himself in the shell of Yahiko, because she’d loved him too, and even if it wasn’t quite the same they were still family, soulmates, blood. There had been no words for what they were in common parlance, or Jiraiya’s books, or the old plays she’d glimpsed being performed in a quiet, old-fashioned hamlet she’d passed through in the early Akatsuki days. She remembers telling Naruto  _ “Yahiko and Nagato meant everything to me,”  _ she remembers the ink-haired kunoichi who threw herself between Naruto and Pain, knowing she couldn’t win, knowing she couldn’t stand on the sidelines. She thinks he understood. She hopes he understood.

She will never stop remembering the day Yahiko died. She’s found herself back on that cliff in a thousand dreams; she knows she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to think her way off it, find a move that wouldn’t have taken both her boys from her at once. The last words she screamed to them will always tear her throat.  _ Both of you escape.  _ The moment of sickening, revolting horror and sudden furious hate when Nagato picked up the kunai; the way it increased one thousandfold, shot through with a million shards of pain, when Yahiko ran into the blade instead. 

She doesn’t remember much of what happened after Nagato summoned the Gedo statue. She doesn’t remember when exactly they learned what happened to Kyusuke, Daibetsu, Kie, and the rest. Listening to Nagato explain it all to Naruto was the first time she’d had all the pieces and in the months since then she’s wondered if it was worth it. To feel again the pain of losing their brothers in arms. To finally know Yahiko’s last words. To remember what Nagato had said to her, in the space between losing their partner and Nagato losing himself. 

_ You and Konan must do everything you can to survive. _

_ Konan, hold onto Yahiko and stay still.  _

“We did as you told us,” she says now, and her own voice startles her after so much time with their ghosts. “We tried. We both did.” 

Konan knows that Tobi is coming for her. She signed her death warrant when she built this shrine; even without it, she was the last person to see Nagato’s remains. Tobi will not let the Rinnegan elude him for much longer; she understands the scope of his madness now, understands there is no limit to the things he will do to achieve his delusion. She should have cremated their remains; should have done it before she left Kohona and scattered the ashes where they could bring no harm to Ame. She knows what she should have done, even as she acknowledges that she would never have done it. 

This is all she has left of the two people who meant everything to her. And she is not done fighting for them. The civilians think that the new bridge over Amegakure Lake was a gesture of goodwill, a promise that she’d committed them to a new era of prosperity, but the shinobi know better. There is a jounin team assigned to the lakeshore at all times, watching for errant children and misinformed intruders and pets like Chibi. Perhaps it’s futile, but Tobi cannot hear even the slightest hint of what awaits him. 

Thoughts of battle have her surging to her feet, plunging back into the world of the shrine. The dissonance between dream and reality makes her dizzy for a minute. The flames are burning low; the fury of the rain has lessened, the way it always does just before dawn. She has been here for hours, and her shinobi will be arriving at the mission room soon, expecting to be assigned to missions that she will approve . It’s time to leave. 

She douses the lamps as she thinks of them. Her shinobi, her people, her village, out in the rain somewhere. Hoshiko’s shift at the beacon will have ended by now; she’ll be in the jounin barracks, getting those two hours of sleep before sunrise. Her genin team will be in the dormitories a few blocks away, scuffling and plotting trouble and eventually falling hard into sleep the way children do. If they know what’s good for them, Rai and Akiara will be in the hospital, sleeping off the worst of the pain; Kaida will be out on patrol with a chuunin team, because they’ve all learned the hard way that Ame jounin don’t take well to being benched, to sitting quietly while their teammates sleep undefended. All they have is each other, after all. 

_ If you hesitate, I’ll leave you behind! _

_ Like I’d let you!! _

They’d asked promises of each other, all three of them. Yahiko told them to survive and Nagato told her to hold on and when she told Yahiko to keep up he swore he would. And then he left her behind. Promises made and kept and she knows she won’t be keeping her promises much longer. Tobi is coming for her. But she has other people to protect now, and she will not leave them undefended. She will do her best to give them that better world her boys wanted, even as she leaves them behind. 

She steps forward from the Rinnegan and places a hand on each of the caskets. She stands for a moment, lets the memories and voices and dreams fill her up, fill her full of warmth. Then she steps away. She takes step after step until she is standing in front of the wards, unsealing them and then sealing them again behind her, stepping out into the mouth of the ravine. The sky is damson shot through with ebony, a dark Amegakure dawn. Rain comes down from the heavens, sinking into her dry robes, surprising her like a leak in a roof, and she thinks of the hideout they’d built on the riverbank so long ago, the place they’d first been happy since their parents died, the place they were safe together. 

Konan will be thirty-five the day after tomorrow and she will be dead before the year is out, but some things are still constant. Some promises survive, like the rain over Amegakure, like a once-shared dream of peace, like the words said so long ago she no longer remembers if they were Yahiko’s or Nagato’s.

_ Even if we’re split apart, let’s meet back here one day. _

  
_ Wait for me, then,  _ she thinks, and steps out into the rain.  _ I’m on my way.  _

**Author's Note:**

> Unabashedly non-canon compliant. My knowledge of the series/fandom comes mostly from what I've gleaned by hanging around on the Archive; naturally, errors and liberties are going to be a thing. But the more I learn about the Ame Orphans the madder I get, and that always ends in a fic. Also, I've developed a deep obsession with Amegakure and wanted to do it justice. Comments and kudos are appreciated!


End file.
